Adult Social Care Co-production Strategy 2024 to 2029 Methods and Levels of Participation

Methods and Levels of Participation

Engaging and interaction with people takes many forms, from supporting an individual to make decisions about their own life, right up to participating in strategic decision-making. All levels of engagement are valuable and valid, both to people and to adult social care decision-makers, however different outcomes will require involving people in different ways and at different stages in the process.

Engagement

Participation
Engagement is the generic term which refers to the entire range of possible interactions between an organisation and the people who access, benefit from, or have an interest in its activities, services and/or policies. This will include professionals in organisations as well as service users and members of the public.

People being actively involved with policy makers and service planners from an early stage of policy and service planning and review, to shape and influence the outcomes and decisions.

How we know it’s participation: the organisation engages people in a conversation, gathering and understanding people’s views on a topic, which could be in person, online, or through digital correspondence but with the emphasis on doing things together.

Involvement

Strategic Participation

Involvement is 'involving people with an interest in achieving goals, and ensuring that those people reflect the diversity of the area which the organisation serves.'

This description is quite broad: it can be interpreted to mean stakeholders and not necessarily people. Involvement requires organisations to be open to influence from people and stakeholders, moving to a culture of ‘working with’ rather than ‘doing to’. In contrast to consultation, involvement approaches work with people at earlier stages, such as helping to identify issues and potential solutions, and being supported to remain involved right throughout design, implementation and evaluation processes.

Involvement covers citizen engagement as well as stakeholder engagement.

Not all involvement is co-production (the audience or end users might be other organisations or professionals), but all co-production is involvement (when your audience or end users are people and community members).
  • Concerns long term planning
  • Concerns what kinds of services are needed and how much money should be spent on them
  • Requires a supportive organisational or cultural ethos and commitment
  • Can take place within formal strategic decision-making processes, or via mechanisms which input the views of people from individual feedback, projects, or services
  • Influences policy and practice at a local, regional or national level
  • Requires a partnership working approach between the decision maker and the contributing individuals or services
  • Includes meaningful roles in terms of priority setting, monitoring and designing services project

Stakeholder Engagement

Co-production
Stakeholder engagement generally refers to interactions with organisations and professional bodies, who have an interest in, or influence over, an organisation’s activities. Other statutory organisations, public bodies, Members of Parliament, voluntary organisations, and interest groups, may all have something to say about an organisation’s proposed course of action. They may need to be kept informed, be invited to share their views and recommendations, or be part of collaborative relationships and partnership working. Even though technically the public has an interest (a stake) in an organisation’s decisions, in current use they don’t tend to be included within the term 'stakeholder engagement'. 'A way to working that involves people who use services, carers, and communities in equal partnership; and which engages groups of people at the earliest stages of service design, development and evaluation.'

Consultation

Community Engagement
A formal process by which policy makers and service providers ask for the views of interested groups and individuals. Consultation documents usually include information, about which feedback is being requested.

Community engagement (also referred to as public or citizen engagement) refers to interactions with people who may be variously referred to as people who use services, people, customers, patients, community members, people we support and the public - depending on the cultural norms in the sector of activity.

Whatever the term used, their key defining characteristic is that they are connected to the organisation as non-professionals, usually as users of a service provided by the organisation, or otherwise as members of the broader public. This means that they are less interested in the inner processes of the organisation, and more so in the effect that these would have in their lives.

Information
Providing the public with balanced and objective information. In the context of policy or public services, the aim is to enable people to understand a service, a problem, changes and decisions.